It is customary in clinical treatment for eliminating concretions within a bodily cavity, for example of stones within a kidney, to destroy them by means of ultrasonic shock waves, particles of concretion remaining in the bodily cavity being flushed out by way of natural outlets or drawn off by means of a suction and flushing pump.
Long experience in the clinical use of so-called "ultrasonic lithotriptors", has taught that treatment therewith does not succeed in all applications on account of anatomical conditions, amongst other factors. The destruction of stones within the gall bladder is an example of a clinical field in which ultrasonic lithotriptors can only conditionally be used, such limited usability being attributable to the fact that particles produced by the disintegration of a gall stone cannot pass through the ductus cysticus, or cannot pass therethrough completely.
Another method of removing concretions from bodily cavities, the application of which depends upon the nature of the concretions, is by use of a solvent. In this method, the solvent is commonly infed by puncturing the skin of the patient. A disadvantage of this method is, however, that the dissolution of a concretion by the solvent is comparatively protracted. Also, the infeed of the solvent through the patient's skin and the required draining of bile through the skin are distressing to the patient. Such protracted dissolution is, amongst other things caused by the fact that the solvents usually selected are lighter than the bile so that the solvents increasingly accumulate on the bile secreted during treatment whereby their effectiveness is reduced.